Little Frankie Schantz emerged into a near perfect life in Centerville, Iowa. He believed that his life would always be so. He was wrong. Everything would change in the summer of 1945 when meningitis would leave him permanently deaf. In Silence of Centerville, Frank Schantz looks back across the rocky landscape of his life and delivers his own story from the perspective of an aging deaf man. As a boy, Frankie would endure the ostracism and loneliness that plagued so many deaf Americans during their darkest era. Over the course of decades, Frank would discover that nothing in life, not even the harshest of times, can last forever.